PART
1: ZINES
A year or two ago I made a plea in this mag for anyone to
send me zines, any zines at all, and nothing happened -- until
two or three months ago, when all of a sudden the mailman
brought me three zines in one day. A couple days later, I
bought a couple more, and I've gotten two more in the mail
since then. Maybe it just took a year or two for people to
actually read my plea. Either way, thanks, everybody, for
one of the greatest weeks of my life, because I'm a reading
addict, and as some other reading addicts will know, reading
a zine can take you places you won't go with any other form
of literature (although there is some overlap with essay/
memoir, comix, stuff like that), a place that offers a devastating
twist on the realities created by large-circulation newspapers
and magazines. Good zines, bad zines, it doesn't matter, zines
are a rare form of high low art. (Increasingly rare on paper,
thanks to the internet and crap like Blastitude.) Anyway,
here's a little rundown of what I acquired in this most banner
of weeks:

On
the aforementioned three-zine day, two of them were in the
same envelope, and it had a San Francisco, California return
address. Pulling the first one out, I came face-to-face with
no name, no masthead, and no text, just Johnny, Mr. Carson
himself, staring right at me with that smile, in
glorious full-color. I was soon to find out that this was
the debut issue of something called Night Moves.
Printed on crappy newsprint paper, with no paper-stock differentiation
from the body to the cover (a great crap style-move which
I really dug back on Cimarron
Weekend #3 or 4, whichever before they went "glossy"
-- see also recent issues of Roctober),
this is a slim volume featuring typo-ridden text, intentional
stupidity, and retarded humor, and I'll be damned if the little
thing hasn't completely revived my faith and motivation in
words about music printed on paper. Interviews with Paul Costuros
(of Total Shutdown) and Dave Broekema (of Numbers), 7000 Dying
Rats, a movie review by CansaFis of No Doctors, "Here
Is The Porn: An Odyssey Into Sex" (the obligatory porn
piece that not all zines dare to publish), live reviews, a
whole bunch of record reviews that make an art out of having
no more insight than "From the first track, to the last,
this album will have you listening and grooving to the wondrous
sounds contained herein on this record," a 25 Suaves
tour diary ("practically unreadable -- so we printed
it twice!"), "some shit Matt Saint Germaine wrote,"
articles in praise of the band Monoshock and the subgenre
Panic Rock (?!), and a KEY interview with none other than
Nandor Nevai. Waitaminnit, this thing must not be that
slim! Night Moves is sort of associated with the
Bay Area "spockmorgue posse," and I believe the
publisher/editor is writer/funnyman Mike McGuirk, whose journalistic
endeavors memorably grace the pages of the San
Francisco Bay Guardian. He's kind of Meltzer-esque, I
guess you could say, and this zine is pretty Meltzer-esque,
filled with absurdity and misinformation and non-sequitirs
and non-reviews. But the Meltzer way is to use that stuff
to AVOID writing about new rock music, because "rock
is dead" or something, while Night Moves thinks
rock is very much alive, and uses absurdity as a cover, or
an icebreaker, so it can walk right up to new rock music and
give it a big hug.

Also
in the San Fran envelope and also inspiring was a zine called
A Dangerous Game. Quite a bit more serious
than Night Moves, but not without its own dry Dada-whiffs
-- the most Dada thing about it being the incredibly crappy
layout! The type face is so small, mis-centered, and unassertive
that it's almost unreadable, and every article seems to have
at least one major layout glitch, usually a mis-collated or
backwards page. There's even one page that can only be read
by being held up to a mirror, and it's unintentional -- even
though it's a metal interview! I should point out that more
than once in the mag the publisher himself, Will York, apologizes
for the look ("Thank you for not laughing too loudly"
he says at one point), but please, whatever Mr. York lacks
as a designer, he more than makes up for it as a writer, editor,
and interviewer. In fact, A Dangerous Game is made
up entirely of interviews (that's right, no reviews, articles,
profiles, essays, or thinkpieces, nothing but transcribed
Q&A), one half with metal bands and the other half with
new noise prog etc. bands. (It's even got a double front cover
where you flip it over and turn it upside to read the other
half, an ambitious concept that is probably to blame for all
the pagination snafus.) York also shows up here and there
in Night Moves -- in fact, the Nandor Nevai and 7000
Dying Rats interviews appear in both mags pretty much word
for word, and you can buy both mags two-for-the-price-of-one
postage-paid-in-the-U.S. from Mr. York for an unbelievably
mere $3. (Specific info at the end of this review.) And boy,
that Nandor Nevai interview is a beaut that deserves to be
printed twice! The guy's got some information to share, as
long as you can break through his personal chemically-saturated
verbal meaning buffer. Many other highlights as well, such
as an interview with San Francisco metal band Impaled, who
I have not heard but I have to say give one of the most humorous
band interviews I've come across since the Melvins! I also
found a chat with Karl Sanders, the leader of the Egyptian-themed
metal band Nile, refreshingly straightforward ("A good
percentage of my song ideas, I get from watching the Discovery
Channel," "I don't think man has changed.
I think technology has pushed man's spirituality and real
intellectual development into the background. I think we have
regressed as a species," "I think people
take death metal ideas much too fucking seriously
. . . . Hello people! It's all entertainment. It might be
an alternative form of entertainment -- fascinating and left-of-center
-- but you know, it's still entertainment."). Here's
the whole roll call of interview subjects . . . for "the
music issue" there's The Locust, Flying Luttenbachers,
The Curtains, Savage Republic, Andee of tUMULTt Records, Marco
Eneidi, Orthrelm, Touchdown, Wolf Eyes, John French, and Total
Shutdown, and for "the metal issue" there's Exhumed,
Impaled, Entombed, Nile, Lamb of God, Isis, Godflesh, Sigh,
Dan Swano, Solefald, and the aforementioned Nandor Nevai.
(UPDATED
12/21/08: To purchase a 2-pack of Night Moves and
A Dangerous Game contact wwyork at gmail dot com!)

As
for the third zine on the now-legendary three-zine day, it
was a nice little thing called Ghost Press.
First off, I'm really sorry to say that the other night, I
absent-mindedly left my copy on the office floor and my cat
pretended it was a mouse or something and tore up the cover
a little bit (pictured). Trust me, your copy will look much
nicer and smoother (unless you have a cat like mine). As for
the rest of it, it's another strict interview mag, but it
adds long introductory profile/essay/impression things by
the editor/interviewer that are kinda nice. "This issue
presents a web of relationships: friends, bandmates, allies,
partners, et cetera... that is one of the many in independent
music today. This one is among the closest and most important
to me, which is why it is gracing this inaugural volume of
ghost press . . ." Starts with a diggable D Yellow Swans
interview, which is followed by a chat with Xiu Xiu who I
just haven't especially gotten into musically, but it's a
nice enough chat, and then the zine finishes with a flourish
via excellent pieces on Rob Fisk (ex-Deerhoof, 7 Yr. Rabbit
Cycle, Free Porcupine Society label, more) and then Steve
Gigante (Dark Inside The Sun, 7 Yr. Rabbit Cycle, more). Written
and published by a guy I think named Scott, who I think lives
in Seattle -- I don't know, when the cat attacked he took
most of the page one credits with him. Which means I can't
really tell you how to get in touch with him to order one
direct, but Spockmorgue
Distro has copies. WAIT, THIS JUST IN: Spockmorgue might
be out, and the best way to get a copy is direct from the
source: scottg23@u.washington.edu . . . . .

Then,
less than a week after the three-zine day, I get another zine
in the mail, this time from "merrie olde" England,
a nice little sheet called Sniper Glue, just
four pieces of paper xeroxed on both sides with rants &
reviews typed then cut and pasted over B&W backgrounds,
all stapled together once in the upper left corner. I'm loving
this 8-pages-and-out neo-mimeograph quick-hitter newsletter
style, also seen this season from Tony Rettman's 200LBU
#4. (Reviewed just below.) This is issue number 9 of Sniper
Glue, and alcoholism seems to be a theme. Right there
on the cover page is a short essay on Charles Jackson's The
Lost Weekend (the book that became the movie), and pp.
5-7 feature a Naturaliste tour diary penned by Blastitude's
own Omaha bro L. Eugene Methe, a pretty grim account of an
alcoholic noise band barely holding it together while far
from home. It starts ominously enough -- "Christopher
Fischer, Charles Lareau, and I flew out to the East Coast,
for two weeks of dates. It should be said that both the group
-- and friends back home -- were genuinely frightened at the
prospect" -- and this tone is maintained and in fact
amplified as the tour progresses on its not-so-rosy path.
Luckily everyone makes it through alive. The zine also contains
some CD reviews and an uneventful live review (Sonic Youth
in Glasgow, but he went home before they played) and a couple
other mini-essays, one of which begins "Hysterical drunken
rants? Is THAT what you're after?" Sure, why not?

I
bought my own copy of the debut issue of Smallflowers
Press -- it just looked so intensive. Indeed, the
entire mag is made up of just three very lengthy interviews
with subjects Dredd Foole, Chris Corsano, and Sunburned Hand
of the Man, the last taking up over 50 pages! OK, Foole and
Corsano rule, both great interviews, and though I still have
not lost my mind to a Sunburned record, Rare Wood
is good, and their live show in Chicago was damn good, and
one thing is for sure: I
dig reading all about them in Smallflowers Press.
I mean, this is the way you do it. This is THE antidote to
music-press PR puffery. Reading everything this mag lays on
the table makes one realize just how incomplete the approach
of any mag with word-count requirements and advertiser specs
is always gonna be. I think it's simply just a natural law
that for wider exposure, one must sacrifice true honesty and
fully fleshed-out portraiture, and vice versa. I understand
wanting to make a financial living for the work you do, but
does it really come down to the fact that in order to accomodate
the highest-paying advertisers one must limit their coverage
to medium-short profiles so that any mogul who pays for publicity
can be accomodated on whatever schedule he or she demands?
I don't know, but the good news is that all that shit washes
away every moment you spend sitting down and reading the "open
fire biograph" conversations in Smallflowers Press.
And here, after reading the whole thing back to back a couple
times, I couldn't even tell you the interviewer/editor/publisher's
name -- and that's the kind of selflessness that makes this
zine such a beaut. Thanks, dude.

Shuttlecock
is a rather formidable yet wacky literature zine that comes
at ya spilling out of a flimsy yellow pouch made of parachute
material or something, barely held together by orange yarn.
Another one-stapler, adding to the looseness of it all. (Not
to mention a couple free-floating stand-alone articles, also
one-stapled, 2 or 3 pages along -- late additions? -- and
other sundry handbills stuffed into the pouch as well.) Casually
compiled essays, drawings, poems, jokes, fictions, and, um,
'events', a lot of crazy nowhere/everywhere/non sequitir words
and stories and treatises that are ostensibly about sex. "The
shuttlecock symbolizes a vagina, a penis, a clitoris, all
in one. If you look at it you'll see all parts within. The
theme of the first issue is Sex. The second issue is Jesus
lives in a taco." Yeah, sure there's some sex in here,
but it's really about nothing and everything, and both are
heavily filtered through a fairly wild neo-wave West Coast
fictional-autobiographical inner-bubble babble zone of rantitude.
One piece, if you can find it, is written by Richard Meltzer
and it's a great surprisingly straightforward piece on how
much he loved The Doors. (Only two pages, but they're full
pages, and the print is small.) Another piece is a faux interview
with George W. Bush, his 'responses'
compiled entirely from indelibly asinine things he has actually
said in public. As for the rest, I just keep flipping to various
prose poems and getting riveted by the bad-ass obscurity of
it all, such as (flip flip) this one, Amy Vecchione bringing
her mighty one-pager "What If You Stood Up" to a
close: "Confidence is a builder, and I built mine out
of milkshakes, cotton candy, roller coasters and knee socks.
I like gold eyeshadow and pizza cutters. I'm totally against
dried fruits, and I really like organic, free range, hormone
free beef dipped in spicy fish and lime sauce. I built mine
out of tattoos and railroad stations. Fires and punches in
the mouth. I built mine out of late night parties and threesomes
with my best friends. I built mine out of stomach to the nose
bundled up on the shores of Lake Michigan asleep next to a
fire after drinking no water, only wine, for three days until
we all thought we were Jesus and were hallucinating. I built
mine out of recovering off of 3 days of tripping wildly on
a shot glass of lsd. I built mine on the Shulgins, and DMT,
and sounds, and air." Alright! Email "theshuttlecock"
at "yahoo dot com."

Ah,
and then there's always The Wire -- as much
as I complain about it, I still own well over 10 copies --
maybe even over 15. Sometimes I just have to spend the nine
dollars or whatever, for example on this issue, #249, in which
a great band is on the cover, from right here in the once
sparsely attended Midwestern USA noise scene. Great looking
cover, too -- way to go, Wire, way to go, Wolf Guys.
I mean, hey, the the Wire staff writes about lots
of great music in every single issue, but it's the way they
write about it, the actual words on paper and my attempt to
read through them, where I have problems. Not problems with
whether or not I agree with their assessments -- the world's
a very complicated place and I can't care too much about all
that shit -- just an overall problem with the way the mag
makes me feel, which is kinda bored and lifeless. It rarely
gets me more excited about what they're covering -- on the
contrary, it often makes me feel less excited, even when it's
a band I love. The Wolf Eyes article is good, written by top-notch
music writer Alan Licht, and the pictures look great, but
I still feel it falls a little short of the mark. For one,
it doesn't catch the hilarious repartee these guys can go
off on in their transcribed Q&A's, and really, that's
my issue, which I tried to expound on a couple reviews back,
the inherent difference between zines and magazines . . .
that it is precisely the lack of professionalism and the lack
of editorial control that makes zines so readable for me,
and it is the professionalism and heavy editorial control
of magazines like The Wire that makes them ultimately
so lifeless and strangely disappointing. When I look at such
a professional cleanly-designed advertiser-driven magazine,
I have to say, "This is all IMPORTANT. A lot of money
has gone into what I'm to be looking at it. If I do not read
and learn from it all, then I am wasting someone's money,
and not just mine!" (Edwin Pouncey is very solid, and
of course I love Byron Coley's column, but after that . .
. David Keenan, of course, passionate and great taste in music,
and damn have you seen volcanictongue.com,
but . . . . I don't know, I like that crazy writer Dave Tompkins
who occasionally does the hip-hop page. The rest is just mush.)

And
then, like Don Rickles finally getting up three hours into
a sloppy friar roast to really schtick it to the comedy aesthetes,
thank goodness there's Tony Rettman to set everything straight
among this here gutter demimonde of a music scene, by printing
up an 8-pager of his own mimeo-style, the long-awaited issue
#4 of 200 LB Underground. He's been on the
Blastitude masthead for a couple years now, so clearly this
is the barest nepotism, but do sincerely check out this mag
if you're at all interested in such artists as Formerly Fat
Harry, Workbench, Bergen White, Mike Fellows, Terry Reid,
Narnia, Kevin Drumm, Vampire Belt, Avarus, the Vitamin B12,
and the afore-mentioned Magick Markers. Also most untouchable
HC Trivia quiz. No staples, but well-printed and folded on
real nice glossy paper, and at only 8 pages it hangs together
like a magazine anyway. And it's a color print job too! E-mail:
"trettman" at hotmail.

And
finally, on a sadder note, Bananafish Magazine
has announced that its 18th issue, now out with the awesome
harsh Don McLean reality cover, will be its last. Understandable,
as the publishers have cranked out an incredible run of eighteen
book-length issues in seventeen years. I've been reading it
since 1992 myself (issue #7). In recent years the magazine
has been particularly astounding, getting up to around 200
pages each issue packed with criticism and insight that can
be equally rigorous and ridiculous, most often firmly demarcating
some rarefied position in between the two poles. And the interview/feature
subjects are endlessly interesting . . . . Jason McLean, Hetty
Maclise, Robert Dayton, Parmentier (those guys were hilarious!),
Paul Winstanley, Volvox, Ana-Marie Avram, Christine Shields,
Agog, mad-cow.org, Reynols, Ota Keiti, Panicsville, NT Fan,
Vote Robot, "Incredibly Terrible Music" by Tom Smith,
Ilhan Mimaroglu, AZ, Universal Indians, Le Dernier Cri, Angst
Hase Pfeffer Nase, Witcyst, William Winant, Solid Eye, Nautical
Almanac, Lucas Abela, Nihilist Spasm Band, Iancu Dumitrescu,
Sufi Mind Game, Crank Sturgeon . . . and that's just going
back to #13, completely leaving out their greatest interview
of all time: Macronympha! (From issue #10.) This final issue
has interviews with Burning Star Core and Monotract, both
long-time Blastitude faves, as well as Joe Colley, "surreal,
interdisciplinary comics" by David Lester of Mecca Normal,
and, of course, more. Every issue of Bananafish features at
least one artist profile/interview that is completely like
"where the h*** did this come from and do they even really
exist?" For this issue, that role is best filled by 1960s
Argentinian composer Nelson Gastaldi, interviewed by Reynols.
And, of course, there's the usual mind-boggling array of record
reviews disguised as incendiary cultural treatises disguised
as vintage surrealism, and of course the always top-notch
accompanying Various Artists CD. Overall, the issue is smaller
than the last few (only 98 pages!), but who can blame 'em?
After years of amazing service, Seymour Glass and Co. are
taking a very well-deserved retirement. Kudos!

Wait,
this just in . . . .I had so much fun reading Roctober#38, I just had to tell you about it. Roctober
tends to compile each issue around a theme, and this time
it's "TV Rock'n'Roll," in which the staff describes
every historical and otherwise memorable rock-and-TV moment
they can think of, like "The Legendary Stardust Cowboy
on Laugh-In (1968)," or Devo being on Square
Pegs, or, one that really brought back some freaky childhood
memories for me personally, David Bowie with Klaus Nomi on
Saturday Night Live. (I didn't know that was Klaus
Nomi! Who is he, anyway?) There's also stuff like "Hanna-Barbera
Rocks" by Plastic Crimewave, "Eleven Notable Jerry
Lee Lewis TV Appearances" by Ken Burke, and most godlike
of all, a VH1 Behind The Music Episode Guide, 22.5 pages of
very small print detailing the ups and downs of every single
Behind The Music! And all of this comes from just one issue
of a magazine that put out another (equally generous) issue
just a month or two before and is going to put out another
(equally generous) issue just a month or two later. And I'm
not even mentioning all the stuff in #38 that isn't related
to TV, like Nardwuar the Human Serviette interviewing Snoop
Dogg -- hilarious!! -- or the astoundingly voluminous work
by Flamin' Waymon Timbsdale, the King of Review Land!

And
wait, one more zine just flew in here, issue #22 of Atlanta-based
Kiss My Grits. I reviewed an earlier
issue or two of this mag a while
back in Blastitude, and it's nice to have it back. They
always seem to have a theme, and this time it's "DISGUST,"
with a picture of some sort of fake meatloaf by Hormel Foods
on the cover. As usual, there isn't a whole lot of full-on
writing, mainly a collagistic assembly of random pictures,
drawings, and sketches. There is a great centerpiece that
lists things that the writers find disgusting. It's a fine
read that goes in part like this: "Vomiting up live things
in a dream. Jennifer Lopez & Ben Affleck. What looked
like a crumb but was a blob of mashed potato (maybe). Bennifer
dead or alive. "Gradual change over time" as opposed
to "evolution." When anyone says "smell my
finger." Robert Frost. Christina Aguilera. The protestant
work ethic. Dan Quayle. Nike. That terror is not reserved
for art. Henry Kissinger's Nobel Peace Prize. Competition
as unquestioned good. The Me Generation. "Mommy is there
monkey in my banana?" HMOs. Ari Fleischer. Unending use
of the words "bitch" and "ho." Liza Minelli."
There's four great pages of this, plus recipes for Coconut
Beer Batter Spam with Raspberry Horse, and Spam Meat Spread,
a blank page with actual dirt on it (at least I hope it's
dirt), and even a couple notebook pages inserted, with actual
hand drawings of disgusting kitty litter and the like, for
that personal touch.